Why You Aren't Closing As Many Clients As You Should

Tracking the right metrics is essential for therapy practice owners to turn inquiries into clients and ultimately serve more people effectively. We discuss the importance of a systematic approach to logging inquiries, understanding lead sources, assessing client conversion rates, and establishing a robust follow-up process.
• Importance of tracking lead sources and inquiries
• Understanding client preferences for better service alignment
• Measuring conversion rates from leads to consultations and clients
• Evaluating the effectiveness of marketing investments
• Establishing a consistent follow-up process to nurture leads

Grab the prospect tracking template here. 

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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl

Chapters

• 0:01 Tracking Therapy Practice Lead Metrics
• 10:03 Follow-Up Process Importance in Therapy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

My name is Craig and I'm the CEO of Desi Financial Coaching. Our goal is simple to help you run a therapy practice that is permanently profitable. If you own a solo or group practice, we're here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money and serves more people. This is the Therapy Business Podcast. I know you're super busy in your day as a business owner and a therapist. Likely you might be seeing clients Maybe you are the only person in your business still so you're juggling client time with running the business and growing the business, which means that things like tracking our lead flows can fall to the wayside. I know I went a long time without paying any attention to this, and it wasn't until I started working with a business coach and they asked me these questions of where are your leads coming from, what's working, what's not? And I just I had no answer for them. So we set up a system in my business to track those things, and now I have customized and created a spreadsheet for our therapy practice clients. Now this sheet is completely free and I'm going to put a link to the show notes If you want to snag it. It's going to all these steps that we're going to talk through today, that you should be tracking, are in this spreadsheet, ready to go, ready to tally up your percentages and what areas are generating the most leads and what is your close rate all those important metrics. So, in the show notes, grab that spreadsheet. It's completely free, it's just a Google Sheets and it's my gift to you.

Speaker 1: 1:28

Now let's dig into a few metrics that I think are incredibly, incredibly important for you to be watching. Number one is what are people coming to you for? So what service are people looking for when they come to you? Now, if you have on your website an intake form, maybe they fill out a contact form. Maybe come to you Now, if you have on your website an intake form, maybe they fill out a contact form. Maybe they're picking up the phone and calling you. Maybe they're emailing you. What are they seeking out? So, odds are, you have multiple services and if I were to go to your website, you probably have maybe not even only different, like specialties, specifications that you're doing, but maybe different types of therapy, like couples therapy, individual therapy, maybe you do intensives, maybe you have workshops that you do. So how can we track what's working and what's not in those areas.

Speaker 1: 2:12

It's important that we keep a log. So if you have an admin taking calls, for example, make this spreadsheet something that they have open and every time they take a call, they're asking what are they seeking out. Or if they receive an email, or they're filtering through the contact forms, what is this person specifically asking for? Are they looking for individual therapy? And we're gonna mark that. Why we want to know this is so you know what is attracting people in the most. That way, we can leverage that marketing.

Speaker 1: 2:42

If you have a specialty, maybe you specialize in trauma therapy and that is what most people are coming to you for, but maybe you also have this other type of therapy, maybe it's just standard couples counseling or something different. That is not really generating a lot of people. It doesn't mean you have to stop doing that, but maybe your marketing efforts and your messaging is really honed in on trauma, trauma recovery, all those things. So using this to your advantage is incredibly valuable, incredibly important. The other thing is, you might discover that you know what. No one is really seeking out these workshops. Maybe you're doing workshops every quarter or every weekend or however frequently, and people aren't looking for it, people aren't inquiring about it, you might find that the only people signing up for it are your current clients. This may be twofold Maybe you decide it's not worth doing anymore, maybe it's not profitable enough, you don't have enough interest, or maybe it is something that you just stop stressing about doing outward marketing for and focus on just telling your own clients about it your own client base, your team's clients. So, keeping these things in mind, this is really really important so that we know what is working, what's not. What do people want and we can lean into those.

Speaker 1: 3:43

The other thing we want to be measuring is how are people contacting you? Where are they reaching out to you? From? What are your lead sources? Some really really common ones are again your contact form. Maybe it's a phone call, maybe it's through psychology. Today it could be a direct referral. Do you have some lead sources from somewhere? Do you have a partner that you work with? We want to track these. Now, in the spreadsheet that I was telling you about, I've put a few of the common ones, but you can add in as granular as you want. I mean it could be this therapist down the road who you know sends people to you, putting those in there so you can track. Where are our leads coming from If you do nothing else?

Speaker 1: 4:20

This is probably the most important thing to be tracking when it comes to your marketing and your lead generation. Where are they coming from? We have to know what's working and what's not. If you're funneling a bunch of money into ads and it's not working, this is a good way to find out. We have to be tracking these things. If you're running ads, we need to be tracking where are they converting? So I can't just look and say, hey, we got a bunch of inquiries on our website. That means the ads are working. Great, we're getting our money back. No, we need to be tracking into the actual flow that, when somebody clicks on that ad, are they ending up on the thank you page of the contact form so that I can see did they go all the way through the process? Or did they just happen to stumble on your website? Or did a friend tell them about it so they typed it in to their web browser and landed on it and then booked a call? You see, we want to be really clear. Are the ads actually covering it or not? You may discover that you're getting almost all your leads from psychology today, or from referrals, and you're spending all this money on ads and come to find out, maybe I need to funnel more energy into more referral partners. So, instead of spending all this money on Google ads, I can turn around and Host lunch and learns, or buy lunch for a therapy practice down the road or for another referral partner, maybe related to your industry. So really key knowing these things what's working and what's not, and then how can I lean into that and leverage it All right. So super, super important.

Speaker 1: 5:48

We also want to know their status. So what ended up happening with these clients, with these leads? Did they turn into leads? Did they turn into clients? Did they go MIA? Did they sign up or do we ask you to follow up later? We want to track this. Were they a no-show? Maybe you scheduled a consultation with them and they just didn't even show up? We want to track all of these things. So making note of what did they sign up for? Did they sign up? Where are they in that process? This is going to give us a really clear perspective on our close rate Of all the leads coming in.

Speaker 1: 6:20

How many are turning into clients? Why is this valuable? This gives us metrics. Metrics are so fantastic because when it comes to marketing, putting ourselves out there doing sales, a lot of emotion can come into play. We can either beat ourselves up, we can feel anxiety about it, we can feel stressed, we can feel put it off because we don't want to do it. But if we can look at a metric that says I got 10 leads and we closed three of them, that means every 10 people that come tapping on our door or in our inbox saying we are interested in learning more, three of them will turn into clients. So then it just turns into a numbers game. Well, how do I get 10 more leads? What can we do? And that's goes back to what's working in our mode of inquiry. How are people finding us so leaning into that? How can we maybe double that, triple that, because that in turn is going to double triple our client acquisition. So the more we have around what's happening with these people, the better.

Speaker 1: 7:15

You might even want to track whether they're booking consultations or not. And again, this all maybe boils down to your process. Maybe your process is they just scheduled that first therapy session and that's it. So maybe we're tracking how many come back for a second call right. What is that conversion rate from consultation to sign up? That can tell us where in this process are we missing the mark. Are we getting leads coming in and booking consultations but not signing up? That means maybe something's wrong with our consultation process. Maybe somewhere in there there's a breakdown in our sales process. Are we selling well? Are we really providing the value or articulating the value of what we do to entice them and encourage them to sign up? If you're finding that not a lot of people are booking the consultations, well then that might mean there's a messaging problem somewhere on your website, your email list, whatever you're doing, maybe it's not and articulating it enough to encourage people to actually reach out and ask for help. So there's a lot of metrics we can get just from that. So tracking how many consultations are we taking out of all these leads and then how many are turning into clients Following each of those steps. Again, we can work it backwards. We know 10 leads turns into five consultations and out of those five consultations we can close three of them. So right, there you have your metrics. If we can get five consultations in the call or in the calendar every week, then we know we're going to get three clients per week coming into our practice.

Speaker 1: 8:43

There are a lot of other things that we want to follow up on or check in on or really tally and mark, but these are the biggest ones. If you measure nothing else in your lead generation process, this is the one I want you to do. So I highly recommend you find a form. You fill it out Now if people are booking right on your calendar. So, for example, if you go to our website to work with one of our coaches we don't have an intake form you click the button and you schedule a free consultation call, a free Q&A call, with one of our team members. On there we have a dropdown that says how did you find us. So that way we can measure that too. Then when I go into our spreadsheet, I can just plug in those answers from Calendly that shows how people found us. So you can do the same thing on your intake forms in your calendars.

Speaker 1: 9:27

Add in all those avenues of how did you find us and the same thing we just talked about. If you know a person down the street send you a lot of referrals, put their name in there, Dr So-and-so, so that way they can credit them and you know, okay, I need to nurture this relationship because they're sending us a lot of business and what can I do to encourage it and to nurture it? So, really, really important. But otherwise, use this spreadsheet Again. It's in the show notes, completely free, download it, plug in and just commit to this year plugging in names and plugging in your prospects and tracking them really well.

Speaker 1: 10:03

Then, once you have the leads coming in, you have to have to have a good follow-up process. Now we have a full episode on our follow-up process, how we check in with clients and how to really stay on top of them. I'm going to link that in the show notes below. But it's essential that you follow up with these people. The number of practice owners that I talk to who don't follow up they reach out once, leave a voicemail and that's it is astounding. In fact, I think they say like 80% of salespeople only reach out one to three times and then after that they give up, whereas the stats say between seven and 12 touch points is what it takes in order to get someone to sign up.

Speaker 1: 10:42

So we want to continuously be touching base, signing or checking in, sending them value, providing value, to just bridge that gap. There's a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear, a lot of shame, many emotions tied to working with a therapist and talking to someone and admitting that you need or want help. So the more we can bridge that gap the better. By having this tracked, then we can take that next step and start tracking our follow-ups and touching base. And how often are we checking in with them and are we staying on top of them to make sure that, whether it's with us or somebody else, they're getting the help they need? Thanks for joining us on the Therapy Business Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with a practice owner that you may know If your practice needs help getting organized with its finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspodcom to learn how we can help.